What device, if any, do I need for “remind me after a power outage…”

Unfortunately this year we have been having a lot of power outages in the early morning around 7-8am. I would say about once a month. I emailed my power company and asked if there was something we should be doing, like limiting A/C or other major appliance use. They didn’t answer that but just said the current day’s outage was due to a raccoon.

I have a second PC (not the one my modem/router are attached to - Hubitat will be attached to modem/router PC of course) that I use as a media server and since it’s in my office, I often forget to turn it back on after an outage. It is on a UPS but the outages usually last longer than the battery would. (I mute the alarms on my UPSes because I really can’t stand them. The UPS software will shut down my PCs on its own.) Not a big deal but I’d like a reminder sent to my phone to turn that PC back on. Could I use a smart plug or some other device to do this… when it detects power after there is none, send me a notification that says “turn on the media PC?”

Of course this is going to have to assume the Hubitat’s power has also been restored and it’s running.

I use the Ring Alarm Range Extender for this purpose. It can report if it is on Mains or Battery.

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The Ring Alarm Extender Gen 2 has an internal battery, and sends an event when the device switches from mains to battery. You can have a simple rule to send you a notification and shut the hub down cleanly.

One caution: when power comes back up, the hub will have missed the event when the device switches from battery to mains, so you will need another rule, triggered on SystemStart (location events) to refresh the Ring device so that you will see the next power fail (switch to battery).

I would send you a screenshot of my rules, but I am halfway across the country and Remote Admin seems to have failed today for me and others. I have turned in a support problem ticket but haven’t received a reply (other than the auto reply. I have previously posted screenshots of those rules in the forum, just search.

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The two mini PC’s I use here both have a setting in the BIOS to Return to Last State under the Power section, so when power restores, they both turn back on.

I made DIY solution. Cheap aqara door sensor and one 240V dry relay. Relay is connected to main power and dry contacts to disassembled door sensor contacts. Once power is out/in, door sensor changes its state and triggers rule. Works like that for almost 2 years without single issue and you get notification on power outage as well as power is resumed. And of course HE hub and router need to be backup powered as well :wink:.

Another idea is a smart bulb that has the feature of allowing you to set a power-on state, which you will set to a particular brightness. Keep it off all the time, so as not to confuse the issue but then when your power is restored it will shine. Create a time-based rule for when you want to get your phone notification and if that bulb is above a certain brightness at the time the rule runs it will notify you that you must have had a power outage, as well as handling turning the bulb off again.

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I wish my media PC had that. It may just be a simple issue of age… it’s an old PC that I built from scratch in 2010 that keeps on trucking. I would love to get an Intel NUC for my next computer… anyone know if it has that feature?

You lost me here. :sweat_smile:

Well yes, but the problem is when the power outage lasts longer than the UPS battery. Usually the power is restored within 2 hours (not that the UPS battery lasts that long if it’s also powering the PC) but unfortunately, especially during severe storm season, we can’t always count on that.

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I have the Ring Doorbell from before Amazon bought Ring, and I do have an extender for it. I wonder if this is compatible and could replace my current extender. I’d have to look into it.

You could very easily create a Hubitat application which sends a notification on system start.

...but the hub wouldn't know the reason for the restart. One could, I suppose, write an app that requests the reason for a restart and stores it, before either rebooting or shutting down the hub; then, on restart, see if it was a scheduled event and then set a switch or take some other action on start up...

If I knew how, I’d be happy to. This is what I was afraid of. Getting in too deep and then finding out too much of what I wanted to do is impossible without custom coding and I don’t know how.

Many of us aren’t developers and have been able to setup pretty complexe home automation setups.

I second that. There’s no need for writing one’s own custom code in this scenario. With a device like the ring extender, you can use rule machine to create a pretty simple rule that sends a notification when the ring extender goes from battery—>mains as its power source.

Ported from ST and modified for Hubitat. Uses a canary bulb to detect the power failure and restores a set of switches to their original state. Triggers every 5 minutes or on hub reboot.

you could use something like this to monitor your server and send a notification when it is "not present" (off)

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@kat Likely in the bios of your PC there should be a setting for power on after power failure. This would at least turn the PC back on. If you are using it to serve out something like PLEX, there are several make program a service apps out there. So you could make your media server program a service which would turn on regardless of you being logged into the PC. I think this would solve your problem without trying to find stuff to add...

BIOS>>PC ON after power failure

launch media server software as service

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